The vast desert of our valley was greatly feared and avoided by travelers for centuries. The only recorded passages across the forbidding and dangerous desert were rare raiding parties of Yuma Indians from neighboring Arizona.

When the Spanish established the missions along the coast of California around 1769 the padres would come to the great, flat, crusted basin of an ancient lake, surrounded by mountains to harvest its salt. (There is no record of any contact between the Cahuilla and the Spanish.)

Such was the scene at the Salton Sink in the 19th century, as Dr. Oliver.M. Wozencroft looked out and imagined making the desert bloom into fertile farmland with the addition of water, by diverting Colorado River water into a series of irrigation ditches.

Wozencroft first saw the Imperial and Coachella Valleys on his way to Northern California for the gold rush in 1849. He and his party almost died from lack of water as they headed west from Yuma, inspiring his unlikely dream of irrigating the desert using the mightiest river in the west.

Wozencroft was monomaniacal in his pursuit of the idea over the next 30 years. He spent his fortune and the rest of his life trying to get Congress to approve the idea. He died penniless of starvation, still dreaming.

But his idea persisted and was carried on by Charles Rockwood and George Chaffey. The two experienced water engineers organized the California Development Company, CDC, in 1896 with the aim to irrigate the Imperial Valley.

Their surveys found the bed of an ancient river, and they would use that as the basis for their canal. In 1901, CDC opened the Alamo Canal, named for the ancient riverbed it followed and they began irrigating some 1,500 acres of barren desert, turning it into productive farmland and allowing for development of a little town. Some 40 miles of the canal dipped below the border into Mexico, east of Calexico, but nobody seemed much concerned.

Construction of the aqueduct.(Photo: Palm Springs Historical Society/Special to The Desert Sun)

The Colorado is named for its red color, which is produced by the enormous amount of silt it carries. Almost immediately the headgates of the Alamo Canal got mucked up with silt, causing the engineers to look for a bypass to continue the flow of water. Over the next three years, they made a series of canals and “cuts” to bypass the accumulated silt.

In the fall of 1904 the Colorado flooded its banks. The deluge was intense and overwhelmed the canal and its “cuts” dumping the entire flow of the mighty Colorado into the canal.

Wozencroft’s original idea would now result in a man-made change in the geography of the entire region. Hundreds of billions of gallons of water were diverted through the cuts and canal into the Salton Sink turning it into the largest lake in California, so large, it was called the Salton Sea.

For more than two years the CDC struggled to close the cuts, placing trainloads of boulders in the path of the water that would subsequently be washed away as if they were pebbles. The CDC appealed to President Teddy Roosevelt and the Congress to help.

In his January 1907 address to Congress, Roosevelt demurred and thought that private enterprise should solve the problem, not government.

He argued, “At present there appears to be only one agency equal to the task of controlling the river, namely the Southern Pacific Railroad…the need of railroad facilities and equipment and the international complication are such that the officers of the United States, even with unlimited funds, could not carry on the work with the celerity required.”

With such an endorsement and inducement, the Southern Pacific Railroad, could hardly refuse the task.

The CDC was taken over by the Southern Pacific Railroad. The flow of water had interrupted the SPRR transcontinental route and had already cost them a fortune. The SPRR set to work trying to control the river. Two years and some $2 million were ultimately required to put the Colorado back in within its banks by closing the cuts. (The international complication of the canal coursing through Mexico would be tackled three decades later with the building of the “All-American” canal.)

The blue salty sea in the middle of the parched desert was subsequently discovered by migrating birds, and by developers and leisure travelers who turned it into a destination resort for water skiing and boating. But that’s another story, and one Wozencroft could hardly have imagined.